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More news on the blue wave front — 6 Comments

1. I’ve been back in FL for about 5 years now and Scott is running political commercials throughout the day on TV, whereas I’ve yet to see one for Nelson.

   But a lot of moderate democrats dislike Scott. My perception as a constitutional libertarian/conservative is that Scott promises big and underdelivers. I suspect he’s a RINO.

   He signed into law an unconstitutional limit on gun purchases by citizens under 21. In doing so he derailed any accusations of “insensitivity” and the hell with the Constitution appears to have been his reasoning.

   In his political commercial, he strongly supports term limits but makes no personal promise of setting an example and he gives NO strategy for how he’s intends to convince a majority of Congress to slice their own political throats by voting for term limits…
   “Rick Scott’s term limits idea: Hugely popular and highly unrealistic”

   “WASHINGTON – Gov. Rick Scott’s first policy idea as a U.S. Senate candidate won’t happen and most of his fellow Republicans don’t support it.

   But it’s a surefire applause line at political rallies.

   Scott wants term limits for members of Congress: 12 years and no more in an entrenched system where power is determined almost entirely by longevity.

   “In Washington, they say this can’t be done. That’s nonsense,” a relaxed-looking Scott says in his first campaign TV ad, standing before an outline of the U.S. with a red felt tip pen in his hand. “We don’t work for them. They work for us.”

   It sounds good, but it’s almost impossible.

   Scott, 65, has seized on a popular issue in a race in which his opponent, Democrat Bill Nelson, 75, is a veteran of three terms in the Senate who was first elected to the Florida Legislature in 1972, the year that President Richard Nixon won re-election.

   There’s a reason why term limits don’t exist for Congress.

   It requires an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, an enormous political undertaking that would require the support of two-thirds of members of Congress followed by three-fourths of the states.

   “Scott is running on something that’s popular, but is almost impossible to make happen,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida. “It’s a symbolic thing, and he’s about 20 years late.”

   Term limit proposals swept the country more than two decades ago. Florida voters in 1992 voted to impose eight-year term limits on all state legislators and Cabinet members.

   The change created a revolving-door Legislature in which many House members spend years jockeying for Senate seats, and critics say term limits have made lobbyists and staff members more powerful.”

2. Bill Nelson is 75 years old, has been in Congress for 30 of the last 39 years, and has held public office for 42 of the last 46 years. Standing for re-election is de trop.

   Mandatory retirement and rotation in office should be the order of the day for members of Congress: minimum age to run set at 39, maximum age set at 72. Four year terms. No one serves more than 10 years in any bloc of 12 or stands for election if he’ll hit that wall during the course of a term. Senators elected by the House delegation and functionally differentiated.

3. Political scientists who specialize in Congress are commonly shills for the institution.

   It’s time for an Article V convention to impose rotation-in-office on our horrid federal legislature.

4. The change created a revolving-door Legislature in which many House members spend years jockeying for Senate seats, and critics say term limits have made lobbyists and staff members more powerful.”

   ‘Critics’ say a lot of things. They aren’t necessarily true.

   Here’s an idea: eliminate the upper chamber of the legislature. An alternative would be to have a functionally differentiated upper chamber elected by the lower chamber (common among colonial legislatures). The upper chamber could be made up of (1) members of the lower chamber who retain their floor vote in the lower chamber but serve in the upper chamber in lieu of service on standing committees of the lower chamber and (2) people not elected to the lower chamber but were eligible to run for it.

   As for the executive, elect the governor and only the governor. Have a multiplicity of appointive Lt. Governors each with authority over a portfolio of state departments; the number and the portfolios in question would be at the discretion of the governor. There would be a number of strategems you could employ if you wanted someone to have more independence: appointment in the first instance followed by retention in office referenda (say, for the attorney-general), appointment from lists nominated by guilds (say, for the state comptroller), appointment for long non-renewable terms, &c.

   While we’re at it, it’s a reasonable wager that freshmen legislators are the least likely to be chums with lobbyists.

5. It’s really impossible to believe anything that comes out of the mouth of a MSM pundit/pollster after the last election.

   Part of them regrets being so wrong in their prognostications. They regret the implication that they potentially cost their given candidate by suppressing Democrat voter turnout by saying it was going to be a Hillary landslide.

   At the same time, they don’t want to give up their base impulse to use their position to influence the elections as they have done in the past, primarily by trying to suppress Republican voter turnout through issuing false or inflated polls in favor of Democrat candidates.

   If indeed all polling is done with an interest in having the Democrats ultimately win, it didn’t make any sense to trot out the “blue wave” narrative almost a year before the elections. If you hammer people for that long with the message that Trump is awful and they’re going to lose badly, you will probably end up motivating them to vote…again.

6. They are paid to be wrong.

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